How your agent follows the diagram
Every agent has a default step called General conversation — the catch-all where the call starts and where your agent comes back when nothing more specific is going on. When a caller says what they want, the matching journey begins: a journey’s first step carries a plain-English condition that tells your agent when to start it (“The caller wants to place a bread order”), and steps that follow another step start automatically once the one before them is done. When a journey finishes, your agent either goes back to General conversation or ends the call — and the ending sits at the bottom of each journey as its own box, labelled Return to General conversation or Hang up. Click that box and the settings panel opens on How the journey ends. Pick which of the two it is from the list (labelled After and the step’s name) and, for a hang-up, write How your agent says goodbye — “Thank them for calling and wish them a good day”, say. On a voice call that goodbye is spoken as its own final message before the line drops; leave it blank and the step’s last reply is the goodbye. Switching a hang-up back to Return to General conversation removes the goodbye with it, so you’re asked to confirm if you’d written one. A step that branches into other steps can’t hang up itself — give each branch its own ending instead. Train your agent creates journeys for you from a description; this canvas is where you see exactly what it built and fine-tune it by hand.Working the canvas
- Add step creates a new step and opens it in the settings panel, ready to name.
- Click + under a step to add the one that follows it. On a step that ends the call, the new step goes in before the Hang up, which moves down to follow it. General conversation has no +: nothing can follow it, because it is where your agent comes back to. A new journey starts from Start instead — click the + under it (Add a starting point), say What the caller wants, and that becomes the first step’s condition.
- Drag a step onto another to move it underneath. Drop it on a step that ends the call and, as with +, it slots in before the Hang up — provided nothing follows the step you’re dragging.
- Drag from a dot on one step to another to link them.
- Select a step and press Delete to remove it — any steps that followed it are unlinked, not deleted. Remove a step that sits before a Hang up and, if the step above it has nothing else after it, the Hang up moves up to that step, goodbye and all. Selecting the Hang up itself and pressing Delete removes it, so the journey returns to General conversation. The General conversation step can’t be removed.
- Tidy up rearranges everything into a neat layout after you’ve been dragging things around. The controls in the bottom corner zoom and fit the diagram.
Step settings
Pick any step and the Step settings panel opens beside the canvas:- Name — what this step is for, in a few words.
- When does this step start? — shown for steps that begin a journey: the plain-English cue your agent listens for. Steps that follow another step don’t need one.
- Instructions — what your agent should do during the step. The step completes once its instructions are done and every detail marked “must be collected” has been captured — and your agent never re-asks for anything it already has.
- Information to collect — the details your agent gathers in this step. Each one has a name, an optional note on how to ask for it (“a UK postcode”), and a Must be collected tick if the step shouldn’t complete without it. A detail the build chat set up to feed one of your connected apps also carries a small read-only label — date and time, date, number, email address or phone number — showing the shape your agent records it in; plain text details have no label.
- Actions — things your agent actually does in this step: sending an email, creating a booking, putting the caller through to a person or team. Actions that work through your connected apps can be added before the app is connected and wired up later. Tick Must complete this action if the step shouldn’t finish without it. If a must-complete action can’t be done — your calendar refuses the booking, say — your agent tells the caller plainly what couldn’t be done, never implying it went through, and offers what it can do instead: take a message, or arrange a call back. It doesn’t give up while the conversation is still moving — a caller picking a new time is progress, not a stall — but after three turns in which nothing has moved on, it gives up on that step and goes back to General conversation. The rest of that journey doesn’t run, and a failure never ends the call — even on a journey that normally hangs up. If the app never answered, so the booking may or may not have gone in, your agent says it couldn’t confirm it rather than claiming it did, and doesn’t try the same booking again. Actions that put the caller through — to the person they ask for, to a person or team you pick, or to one of our receptionists — are the exception: they need a live phone call, so in a chat, a text message or a conversation in the test drawer your agent isn’t offered them at all. It says plainly that it can’t put the person through there, offers what it can do instead, and the step then completes like any other rather than being given up on.
- Remove step — takes the step out of the journey.
What a caller hears while an action runs
On a phone call, an action takes a moment — checking a calendar, sending an email, looking somebody up — and your agent doesn’t leave the line silent while it works. Rather than a fixed “One moment”, it says a short line of its own about what it’s doing for the caller: “Let me check those dates for you”, “I’ll get that noted.” The line is spoken in whatever language the caller is speaking, and it describes the purpose, never the systems behind it — a caller hears “I’ll check your details”, not the name of your CRM. It never states a result before the action has come back, so the answer only follows once it’s real. If your agent has nothing useful to say about a particular action, it falls back to “One moment.” You hear the same lines on a test call as callers do.Dates, times and the details a caller gives
When your agent books, records or sends something through a connected app, the details go through as the caller agreed them — but never in the caller’s own words. A detail that is a date and time, a number, an email address or a phone number is recorded in a fixed shape worked out from what the caller said — an exact date and time rather than “Friday at two”, a number in digits, an address as it should be typed — so the app always receives something it can use. A date and time always goes through in your agent’s own time zone — Your time zone on the Personality & voice tab — however the caller phrased it, so a booking lands at the hour they agreed. When a caller names a day of the week, your agent looks the date up from the days ahead rather than counting, so “Friday” is the coming Friday. There’s no need to describe date formats or time zones in a step’s instructions. And when a date and time is written into a message or email your agent sends — a confirmation saying when the appointment is — it reads as a person would say it, “Friday 2 October, 2:00pm”, rather than as a machine timestamp.When one action depends on a check
Some actions only make sense once something has been checked — booking a slot is only worth doing when the calendar says it’s free. Where one action depends on another like that, the dependent one carries a read-only Runs only after: line naming the check it waits on, and your agent can’t run it until that check has come back successfully for the details as they currently stand. If the check says the time is taken, your agent says so and offers another time rather than booking over it. An answer given early in a call can go out of date: the caller asks about Tuesday, gives their name and number, then settles on Wednesday. Your agent never books Wednesday on the strength of a check that answered about Tuesday — the moment a detail the booking runs on changes, the earlier check stops counting, and your agent runs it again on the new details before the booking can go ahead. You don’t need to add a second copy of the check to the journey: one check, linked to the booking, is enough. Only checks are run again this way — an action that writes something, like sending an email or creating a booking, is never given a second run, because running it twice would do it twice.Like everything in the editor, canvas changes save to your draft — try them from the Test agent drawer, then publish when a real call should follow the new journey.